LEGO Remake – alternate model instructions

LEGO recently launched a new website called LEGO Remake, with the intention of providing alternate building instructions for official LEGO sets. The site was created in collaboration with LEGO fan designers from Rebrickable.com, but while Rebrickable mostly offers more advanced alternate models for teen and adult builders, LEGO Remake focuses on 7-10 year-olds. Below you can find more details about this interesting new website and how it works. 🙂

LEGO made the following announcement:“As you might have heard and seen, we launched a new site on LEGO.com called LEGO Remake. The intention with this site is to provide older children with creative inspiration to what alternative builds they can make with existing LEGO sets. In order to provide the inspiration, we reached out to seven amazing fan designers through Nathan Thom, the owner of Rebrickable. The Rebrickable website inspired the LEGO Remake project, and over the past 6+ months we have been working closely with the adult fan designers to find a way to make alternative builds to existing LEGO products. Together with the fan designers, it is our aim to inspire children all over the world to keep building. The site is meant to be a real life test, to determine the appeal to children. The fan designers have made some really creative builds within some tough constraints and we are really proud of what they have achieved. All instructions and images are created by the fan designers based on a number of guidelines for e.g. building instruction design and model design. For now, the site is a pilot and not many builds are up yet, but we have more in the pipeline, pending internal tests.”

There is also a blog post on Rebrickable (full article here): “The LEGO Remake site will be showcasing the alternate build creations from designers who have shown a talent for them. LEGO recognizes that the fan community can produce amazing designs and building instructions at a rate far faster than their own designers who must comply with very stringent rules. Plus the effort spent in creating instructions and all the other marketing material around a set release takes a lot of time (and money). The LEGO Remake models are somewhere between official LEGO sets and MOCs you would normally find on Rebrickable – they have passed LEGO’s tests but are still 100% fan-designed with fan-created building instructions and fan-taken photography. Remake is an attempt at making this content more publicly visible – and hopefully, make Rebrickable more visible at the same time!”

As the site is still in its test phase, the initial content was limited to LEGO City sets specifically targeting 7-10 year-olds. The designers also had to follow LEGO provided guidelines to ensure that the models were suitable for the target age-range. LEGO also performed extensive testing and study groups with children on the actual models and instructions you see on the site. So while these alternate models were created by LEGO fans, they went through the same vigorous testing process as regular LEGO sets.

The alternate instructions on LEGO Remake are divided into three categories. Mini Remakes use only a few elements from an official LEGO set to create something else. Part Remakes use a good number of the pieces found in the original set, and Full Remakes repurposes most of the elements in the new build. So whether you just want to build a small table-scrap, or completely rebuild your set into something else, there are plenty of options.

Again, currently only about a dozen of the LEGO City sets are used for these alternate models, but hopefully other sets and themes will be added later as well. You can head over to the LEGO Remake website to see if any of the sets you own are included, so you can start building right away. Or, if you want to buy any of the sets used on the LEGO Remake website, they are available at the LEGO City section of the Online LEGO Shop. Note that some sets come with more alternate models than others, so you might want to choose the ones that have the most options.

So what do you think? How do you like the LEGO Remake website? Have you built any of the alternate models already? What other sets and themes would you like to see added? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below! 😉

While I think this is a great idea, I don’t understand why LEGO has to do this when Rebrickcable is already there. Rebrickable already has both advanced and simple alternate models.

This seems to be similar to what they have done with the Rebrick that tried to compete with already established picture sharing fansites. Of course it didn’t work, so they had to completely revamp the site with a new focus on contests for adults (which competes with fansite contests like the ones on Eurobricks).

If LEGO puts some effort into this, with advertising Remake alternate models in the instruction books, and on the main theme specific pages, and get more designers onboard, I think it could work. If it remains a half-hearted endeavor, like Rebrick, it won’t fly.